[This is a (lightly edited) repost of an old blog post of mine, which had attracted over 400 comments, and as such was becoming difficult to load; I request that people wishing to comment on that puzzle use this fresh post instead. -T]

This is one of my favorite logic puzzles, because of the presence of two highly plausible, but contradictory, solutions to the puzzle. Resolving this apparent contradiction requires very clear thinking about the nature of knowledge; but I won’t spoil the resolution here, and will simply describe the logic puzzle and its two putative solutions. (Readers, though, are welcome to discuss solutions in the comments.)

— The logic puzzle —

There is an island upon which a tribe resides. The tribe consists of 1000 people, with various eye colours. Yet, their religion forbids them to know their own eye color, or even to discuss the topic; thus, each resident can (and does) see the eye colors of all other residents, but has no way of discovering his or her own (there are no reflective surfaces). If a tribesperson does discover his or her own eye color, then their religion compels them to commit ritual suicide at noon the following day in the village square for all to witness. All the tribespeople are highly logical and devout, and they all know that each other is also highly logical and devout (and they all know that they all know that each other is highly logical and devout, and so forth).

Of the 1000 islanders, it turns out that 100 of them have blue eyes and 900 of them have brown eyes, although the islanders are not initially aware of these statistics (each of them can of course only see 999 of the 1000 tribespeople).

One day, a blue-eyed foreigner visits to the island and wins the complete trust of the tribe.

One evening, he addresses the entire tribe to thank them for their hospitality.

However, not knowing the customs, the foreigner makes the mistake of mentioning eye color in his address, remarking “how unusual it is to see another blue-eyed person like myself in this region of the world”.

What effect, if anything, does this faux pas have on the tribe?

Note 1: For the purposes of this logic puzzle, “highly logical” means that any conclusion that can logically deduced from the information and observations available to an islander, will automatically be known to that islander.

Note 2: Bear in mind that this is a logic puzzle, rather than a description of a real-world scenario. The puzzle is not to determine whether the scenario is plausible (indeed, it is extremely implausible) or whether one can find a legalistic loophole in the wording of the scenario that allows for some sort of degenerate solution; instead, the puzzle is to determine (holding to the spirit of the puzzle, and not just to the letter) which of the solutions given below (if any) are correct, and if one solution is valid, to correctly explain why the other solution is invalid. (One could also resolve the logic puzzle by showing that the assumptions of the puzzle are logically inconsistent or not well-defined. However, merely demonstrating that the assumptions of the puzzle are highly unlikely, as opposed to logically impossible to satisfy, is not sufficient to resolve the puzzle.)

Note 3: An essentially equivalent version of the logic puzzle is also given at the xkcd web site. Many other versions of this puzzle can be found in many places; I myself heard of the puzzle as a child, though I don’t recall the precise source.

Below the fold are the two putative solutions to the logic puzzle. If you have not seen the puzzle before, I recommend you try to solve it first before reading either solution.

Given that there has recently been a lot of discussion on this blog about this logic puzzle, I thought I would make a dedicated post for it (and move all the previous comments to this post). The text here is adapted from an earlier web page of mine from a few years back.

The puzzle has a number of formulations, but I will use this one:

There is an island upon which a tribe resides. The tribe consists of 1000 people, with various eye colours. Yet, their religion forbids them to know their own eye color, or even to discuss the topic; thus, each resident can (and does) see the eye colors of all other residents, but has no way of discovering his or her own (there are no reflective surfaces). If a tribesperson does discover his or her own eye color, then their religion compels them to commit ritual suicide at noon the following day in the village square for all to witness. All the tribespeople are highly logical and devout, and they all know that each other is also highly logical and devout (and they all know that they all know that each other is highly logical and devout, and so forth).

[Added, Feb 15: for the purposes of this logic puzzle, “highly logical” means that any conclusion that can logically deduced from the information and observations available to an islander, will automatically be known to that islander.]

Of the 1000 islanders, it turns out that 100 of them have blue eyes and 900 of them have brown eyes, although the islanders are not initially aware of these statistics (each of them can of course only see 999 of the 1000 tribespeople).

One day, a blue-eyed foreigner visits to the island and wins the complete trust of the tribe.

One evening, he addresses the entire tribe to thank them for their hospitality.

However, not knowing the customs, the foreigner makes the mistake of mentioning eye color in his address, remarking “how unusual it is to see another blue-eyed person like myself in this region of the world”.

What effect, if anything, does this faux pas have on the tribe?

The interesting thing about this puzzle is that there are two quite plausible arguments here, which give opposing conclusions:

[Note: if you have not seen the puzzle before, I recommend thinking about it first before clicking ahead.]

For commenters

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